inventory-management
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Mir Aamir Has Spent 30 Years Teaching Grocery Stores to Think
From Safeway loyalty cards to ShopBots behind Whole Foods, Mir Aamir has followed one stubborn question across three decades: can convenience work for the shopper without breaking the grocer's economics?
Blaine Hatab Built the Ledger Behind Legal Cannabis
He started with a $30,000 check and a narrow sales tool. Then customers pulled Distru into the far messier business of making cannabis inventory, orders, and compliance agree.
Carl Wasinger Put a Warehouse in Your Browser - Then Kept Building
A western Kansas farm kid saw companies tracking inventory by fax and phone, imagined something closer to online banking, and built Smart Warehousing around one durable idea: the boxes and the data have to move together.
John Manlove Built a Cannabis Marketplace Out of a Phone Call and a Google Doc
After his former company folded, John Manlove had no finished product and no time to mourn. He called the customers, opened a spreadsheet and began rebuilding wholesale cannabis from the awkward details up.
Aiden Kim Built a Drone for the Places GPS Forgot
The B GARAGE founder spent years studying decisions under uncertainty. Then he turned that training toward a stubborn warehouse problem: knowing what is actually on the shelves.
Aakar Khanna
Aakar Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Marble (formerly Truffle), a Y Combinator S26 startup building an AI-native operating system for the restaurant back-of-house. He grew up inside his family's multi-unit restaurant business, cut his teeth as a Goldman Sachs analyst covering restaurants and food & beverage, then spent years in operations roles at venture-backed startups AtoB and Kouper before building software to tackle the two costs that quietly sink restaurants: inventory and labor.
Thomas Rivas
Thomas Rivas is the founder and CEO of Vendoo, a software platform that helps online resellers list and manage inventory across marketplaces like eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, Mercari and Facebook. He started selling online as a high schooler in 2007, kept selling through college at the University of Maryland, and turned the tedium of posting the same item to a dozen sites into a company that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Vendoo has grown to roughly 50-60 employees, reached profitability, and has been used to create tens of millions of listings.
Craig Collins
Craig Collins is the CEO of GraniteWMS, a South African warehouse management software company that has grown from a Cape Town product into a system running in 240-plus warehouses across more than 40 industries and four continents. A University of Cape Town science graduate and one of the early figures in South African barcoding, Collins spent roughly three decades in warehouse operations before leading GraniteWMS's push into the United States, Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean. He hosts the company's 'What The Warehouse' show and is known for a hands-on, floor-level style: he spends much of his time inside actual warehouses looking for practical ways to improve how goods move.
Eytan Daniyalzade
Eytan Daniyalzade is the co-founder and CEO of Toolio, a New York-based cloud platform that helps retailers plan, forecast, and allocate inventory using AI instead of spreadsheets. A Stanford-trained engineer, he built and sold the store-search app Stylr to Walmart in 2014, then spent five years leading omni-channel and digital initiatives at Walmart eCommerce - work that included Sam's Club Scan & Go and Walmart Pay - before leaving in 2019 to launch Toolio with longtime partner Berk Atikoglu. Toolio now serves more than 100 retailers, has managed over $1 billion in inventory, and raised an $8M Series A led by Jump Capital.
Spencer Hewett
Spencer Hewett is the founder and CEO of RADAR, a New York retail-technology company that wires store ceilings with RFID and computer-vision sensors to locate inventory in real time. He dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis to take the Thiel Fellowship in 2012, spent years building and rebuilding the idea, and has since taken RADAR through Old Navy and American Eagle rollouts to a $1 billion valuation on a $170 million Series B closed in May 2026.
Thomas Zanetich
Thomas Zanetich is the CEO of INTURN, the New York enterprise software company that helps large consumer brands manage and sell off slow-moving and excess inventory. He spent close to a decade inside INTURN, most visibly running client success for accounts like Nike, Levi's and KIND, before acquiring the business and taking it back to independent ownership after its stint inside AI firm Mad Street Den. His pitch is unglamorous but real: the surplus goods piling up in warehouses are one of retail's most expensive problems, and there is money hidden in getting rid of them well.
Jackie Wu
Jackie Wu is the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, a company that builds fully autonomous drones that fly indoors and count warehouse inventory without beacons, GPS, Wi-Fi, or a human at the controls. A Northwestern-trained roboticist who spent time inside warehouses on four continents, he grew tired of watching people climb ladders with clipboards and barcode guns, and decided to teach a drone to do it instead. Corvus designs and manufactures its drones in California, went through Y Combinator, and raised a Series A in 2024 to push warehouses toward a lights-out future.
Michael Prokopis
Michael Prokopis is the CEO of DARVIS, a Houston-based AI and computer vision company that gives hospitals real-time visibility into their inventory. A former Navy Surface Warfare Officer and Gulf War veteran turned healthcare supply chain executive, he spent 25+ years managing more than $3.2 billion in spend and driving $360M+ in savings at institutions including MD Anderson Cancer Center and Steward Health Care before crossing to the other side of the table to run the technology company he once wanted to buy from.
Kyle Hency
Kyle Hency is the co-founder and CEO of GoodDay Software, an AI-native ERP built for Shopify-era consumer brands. He previously co-founded Chubbies, the Stanford-born shorts company that ran on irreverence and FridayAtFive energy until Solo Stove acquired it in 2021. Now based in Austin, he's rebuilding the unsexy guts of e-commerce: inventory, orders, finance.
Dhanush Balachandran
Dhanush Balachandran is the founder and CEO of Sortly, a visual, QR-code-driven inventory and asset tracking platform used by small businesses, families, and teams in construction, medical, retail, and education. A marketer-turned-iOS-developer, he taught himself to code, built an app originally called 'My Things,' rebranded it to Sortly, and grew it to millions of downloads. Before Sortly he spent over 15 years across Intel, Apple, DJI, and Y Media Labs, where he forecast worldwide CPU demand, priced server chips, and built ResearchKit medical research apps.
Matthias Depenbusch
Matthias Depenbusch is a German-trained, Vienna-based serial founder who builds software for unglamorous but expensive problems. He co-founded AVISIO, a SaaS platform that used AI-based purchasing suggestions to cut the cost of goods sold for independent 4- and 5-star hotels and restaurants, integrating their POS and PMS systems to automate inventory and ordering. Before that he helped launch Appinio, the Hamburg real-time mobile market-research company that landed 8th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and on the FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. AVISIO won the Hospitality UPGRADE Award 2020 before filing for insolvency in 2023 amid a frozen funding climate.
Kevin Johnson
Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
Micah Rodman
Micah Rodman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kojo, the leading AI-powered construction procurement platform processing over $5 billion in annual materials orders for 600+ contractors across the US and Canada. A Yale alumnus who cut his teeth as a manager on Ray Dalio's team at Bridgewater Associates, Rodman co-founded Kojo in 2018 to digitize the paper-and-phone world of construction materials procurement. He transitioned from COO to CEO after founding CEO Maria Davidson stepped back, steering the company through a $94M fundraise and partnerships with industry giants like Wesco International.
SK Ganapathi
Dr. Srinivasan 'KG' Ganapathi is the founder and CEO of Vimaan Robotics, a Silicon Valley AI company deploying computer vision and machine learning to bring 100% inventory accuracy to warehouses. A serial entrepreneur with nearly 50 patents spanning magnetic recording, MEMS sensors, and supply chain digitization, Ganapathi previously founded Fidelica Microsystems (acquired by Lenovo) and Verreon Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm). With Vimaan, he is transforming how the world's largest 3PLs, retailers, and Fortune 10 companies track goods from dock to shelf - and became the first computer vision startup to receive investment from Amazon's $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Wiley Jones
Wiley Jones is the Co-Founder and CEO of DOSS, a San Francisco-based AI-native operations cloud for physical goods companies. A mechanical engineering graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Wiley spent his early career at Sprite Robotics in China, then at Verkada and Athelas before co-founding DOSS in 2022 with Arnav Mishra. DOSS has raised $73M in total funding including a $55M Series B in March 2026, positioning itself as the inventory and supply chain intelligence layer for modern ERP stacks.
Brandon Hill
Brandon Hill is the co-founder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco-based B2B operating system for the grocery industry. A Stanford graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Hill grew up surrounded by grocery — his grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma and his parents spent 40+ years in the industry. He channeled that heritage into Vori, which he co-founded in 2019 with Tre Kirkman and Robert Pinkerton to modernize the technology stack powering America's independent and regional supermarkets. Vori's AI-powered platform, VoriOS, handles point-of-sale, inventory, pricing, supplier integration, and back-office operations for 140+ stores across 55+ cities, having processed over $500 million in payments. The company raised a $22M Series B in May 2026, bringing total funding to over $32M.
Jayant Kulkarni
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.
Jason Knight
Jason Knight is co-founder and CEO of Lotlinx, a VIN-specific AI platform that helps auto dealerships manage and market individual vehicles with data-driven precision. After 25+ years building and exiting private equity-backed businesses across automotive, CPG, and manufacturing, Knight co-founded Lotlinx in 2012 and formally became CEO in March 2024. Under his leadership, the company grew to $21.7M in revenue and won the 2024 AutoTech Breakthrough Award for best use of AI in automotive technology.